Develop EDA092/DIT400

[From the quality funding application by Vincenzo]

The Operating System course (EDA092 Chalmers / DIT400 GU) is a popular undergraduate course (more than 100 students register to it each year). This course is a crucial building block of students’ curriculum. It does not only cover core concepts for IT and computer Science and engineering,, but also introduces and elaborates on design and implementation challenges for key concepts such as shared data structures, synchronization, scheduling and concurrent and parallel programming, which form the basis of follow-up undergraduate and master courses.

As an Assistant Professor at Chalmers University (starting from January 2015), I will act as one of the examiners for the Operating System course, together with Marina Papatriantafilou.
Starting from the academic year 2014/2015, the course has been updated and improved in order to raise students’ experience, both in terms of learning and preparation for future academia or industry employments. The goal of this project is to continue this improvement, build on last years’ experience.

More concretely, the project aims at improving the Operating System course by means of these steps:

Providing new lab assignment based on international and well-established educational platforms such as Pintos (being used at various schools, such as Stanford, Virginia Tech and Max Planck Institute, for lab assignments).

Integrating lectures with topics (and possibly hands-on experiences) related to modern mobile-based operating systems (such as Android or iOS), which attract students and bring them closer to industry needs, too.

Providing dedicated lectures to cover basic concepts and common pitfalls of c programming. Despite being fundamental for Operating Systems, programming courses based on c are usually not as widespread as courses focusing on other languages (e.g., Java).

Together, these steps would lead to a higher quality Operating System course that is also more engaging and challenging for undergraduate students.